SCHAEFFER: Why Teaching Military History Matters

September 17, 1862. For most millennials and even many of my fellow Gen Xers, this past anniversary date is meaningless. Yet the seemingly endless conversation over race relations in this nation—one that even somehow found its way into a Supreme Court hearing where neither of the parties were black—can be traced back to this most significant of days. At the height of the American Civil War (a conflict far more terrible than any unrest we’ve experienced in this nation since) the great Battle of Antietam was fought between 87,000 Union and 40,000 Confederate troops. At stake was the very survival, and even soul, of our Republic. When the hot September sun finally set upon the devastated battlefield in western Maryland, over 23,000 Americans had fallen. It remains the bloodiest single day in U.S. history, inflicting more losses than 9/11, D-Day, or Pearl Harbor.

One must ask whether the eruptions of racial brush-fires across our nation, five-and-a-half decades after the passing of the landmark Civil Rights Act, might be viewed through more tempered lenses on both sides if they understood just how much we Americans, white and black, suffered together through four agonizing years of wholesale fratricide to end the atrocity of slavery in North America and create a new nation … a nation where a black man, who in antebellum times would have been considered property, was elected by a 72% white nation to the highest office in the land. Two million Union troops fought to end slavery (whether they knew it or not) including 180,000 black soldiers, and recent studies estimate that over 400,000 may have died in the process. Perhaps we could appreciate how much we’ve struggled and fought together to advance civil rights in this country if we were more knowledgeable of battles like Antietam, which gave Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. The march to equality in the United States began not on the football sidelines or even a Montgomery bus, but rather on the killing fields along Antietam creek.